abc – Page 22 – Stilgherrian

04 September 201419 September 2014

Talking geoblocking and copyright on ABC Gold Coast

ABC logo The government’s discussion paper on online copyright infringement came out just over a month ago, the submissions period closed on Monday, and now the debate is really kicking off — including on the complicated legal issue of geoblocking.

Now I’ve already given my opinion on the political spin in the discussion paper itself. But the specific issue of geoblocking came up on ABC Gold Coast, and this morning I spoke with breakfast presenter Bern Young.

Legally it’s a grey area. By signing up for a Netflix account from Australia, for example, you may be breaking the terms and conditions of their service. But you’re still paying for the content, and money is passed on the the actual producers.

The only people missing out are the local Australian distributors who’ve inserted themselves between the content producers and the audience. What value are they adding, exactly? The whole point of the internet is to enable people to connect globally.

CHOICE sees it as a consumer issue. Doesn’t geoblocking, the restriction of content availability by location, restrict competition? They’ve just launched a TV campaign making that point. Even the government’s own inquiry into IT pricing recommended that geoblocking be outlawed.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (3.6MB)

02 September 201402 September 2014

Talking the alleged Apple iCloud hack on ABC Radio AM

ABC logo A few minutes after doing the live spot on Nova 100, I recorded an interview on the alleged Apple iCloud hack for ABC Radio’s national current affairs program AM.

Reporter Emily Bourke would have gone away with a disjointed mess of soundbites, but the disjointedness isn’t so important when it’ll be edited into a multi-voice report.

I think this one quote best summarises my view of the compromise we enter into when using cloud services:

The big problem with creating massive online cloud storage systems — which is now the way we do things on the internet, whether it’s Apple or Microsoft or Google or Amazon or whoever — is that you create a vast honey pot of a target for the attackers.

Once you find one way to get in, you can potentially get access to hundreds of thousands, if not millions of people’s data.

The plus side is such concentrated services means they can hire some of the best security people they can find, putting brains onto the problem is obviously important. So at one level the cloud providers can, if they do it right, protect things far better than you or I could on computer systems under our own control.

The failures are therefore going to be far less frequent. It’s just that when the failures do happen they can be catastrophic.

Here’s the full story, served directly from the ABC website, where you can also read the transcript.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (1.7MB)

A few sentences of my comments were also used in a later report on The World Today at lunchtime, which featured security researcher Troy Hunt.

17 August 2014

Talking robot news on ABC Radio National Drive

ABC logo Robot newsreading and journalism has very much become my thing — as evidenced by the fact that I spoke about it yet again on ABC Radio National Drive on 3 July.

Here’s the news stories that triggered presenter Waleed Aly’s interest:

American news agency Associated Press has joined the ranks of the LA Times and Forbes magazine by adding robots to its workforce.

AP says it will use robots to write its corporate earnings reports, giving finance reporters time to concentrate on more in-depth stories.

The news comes just a week after Japan unveiled its robot newsreader, the ‘Kodomoroid’.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (2.6MB)

17 August 2014

Talking tech on ABC Local Radio, again

Every Tuesday night after 8pm, Dom Knight talks tech on ABC Local Radio around NSW — and I joined him on 1 July 2014.

Also joining us was Belinda Smith, deputy science and technology editor at The Conversation. We spoke about the notorious Facebook experiment, amongst other things.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (27.3MB)

17 August 2014

Talking Todd Carney’s bubbling on ABC 666 Canberra

ABC logo Back on 30 June I found myself talking about the phenomenon of “bubbling”, thanks to Rugby League player Todd Carney and a certain photograph.

“Bubbling”, you ask? The activity where a chap uses his mouth instead of a urinal, as ABC 666 Canberra presenter Jolene Laverty put it. Apparently it’s popular in some skateboarding subcultures.

This recording starts off with an interview with ABC Radio National’s sports presenter Warwick Hadfield, because I think the context is important to understand my subsequent conversation, which starts around 12 minutes in. I speak more about internet fads such as planking.

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12 August 2014

Talking data retention on ABC Radio’s “Life Matters”

ABC logo One of the reasons there hasn’t been so many posts here lately is that I’ve been doing quite a few media spots. I’m about to start catching up — starting with yesterday’s appearance on ABC Radio National’s Life Matters to talk about the Australian government’s plans for mandatory data retention of so-called “metadata”.

To protect against home-grown terrorism and other criminal threats, the government wants telecommunications companies to retain details of your phone and internet use for two years. So should we trade off privacy for security or is this surveillance by the state a threat to civil liberties?

Joining me is Dr Suelette Dreyfus, research fellow in the Department of Computing and Information Systems at the University of Melbourne. The presenter is Natasha Mitchell.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (8.7MB)